Path 2

Tony Hayward Should Really Just Stop Talking

November 9, 2010

Tony Hayward, the English bloke and former oil company CEO with the name that became infamous, and synonymous, with BP’s 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled in the Gulf, and a sense of overwhelming incompetence in BP’s attitude toward said spill (what with his taking time to go yachting, and complaining he wanted his life back, and the leak not being fixed for months), is coming forward once again, for some reason, to emphasize his “no regrets” philosophy.

“I have to confess, at the time I was pretty angry actually,” he said, according to the BBC account of the interview. “I hadn’t seen my son for three months, I was on the boat for six hours… I’m not certain I’d do anything different.”

He also admitted that BP (and he) were ill-prepared for what went down.

“BP’s contingency plans were inadequate. We were making it up day-to-day,” he said.

And there was too much media scrutiny. Which was way unfair.

“What was going on was some extraordinary engineering,” he added. “But when it was played out in the full glare of the media as it was, of course it looked like fumbling and incompetence.”

Anyway, Hayward isn’t, apparently, so confident in his PR skills, and mentioned that he might have done better with the whole media shitstorm (not his words) had he gotten a degree at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art instead of his degree in geology. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to talk to the media every few weeks. Here’s a hint, Hayward…Just. Stop. Talking. Please. We’re not getting paid to be your therapist.